If you know statists....

....you know that consistency is not their bag, collectively speaking of course.

For example, last week Standard and Poors was all but accused of steam-rolling the widows and orphans of Greece in an effort to line the pockets of SP's paymasters, that being the evil banking/finance class. It was as if Heinz Guderian was at the helm of SP:

So Greece has had its debt downgraded.

What an opportunity for profit for the financial markets.

What a disaster for the people of Greece.

And what a triumph for Standards and Poors.

This week, alas, the very same source on SP:

Amazing. Standard & Poors undertsand that the only way out of a recssion is to spend. If you don’t - as Greece will not be allowed to do - then the recession deepens into depression - as Greece’s surely will - debt becomes harder to repay - social crises follow - fascism is welcomed in after that - and hey presto, we have the 1920s and 30s all over again.

Then again, this all comes from the very same source who exorted us all a few weeks ago that:

Let’s ignore the nonsense - the reality is there is no debt crisis - even in Greece

Europe? America? Hello, are you Listening?

Hungary announces a reduction in government.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary's new prime minister, has announced the composition of his cabinet, reducing his team to nine and the number of national ministries to eight.

Orbán has explained his decision to reduce the number of ministries, from 12, and to reduce the size of his cabinet team, from 15, as a cost-cutting measure.

And Gabor Steingart is still a Bearded Clam

Actually it’s a collection of the editors’ political festishes, but in case you were wondering, and I know you weren’t, Clarsonimus has it all doped out for you:

In case you were wondering, and of course you weren’t. let Der Spiegel clear things up for you: “The Oil Catastrophe will be BP’s Katrina, not Obama’s”

On what evidence they can say this is beyond me. The White House has been late AND incompetent on the issue, but are managing to elicit sympathy from the US media, and even the foreign media.

Gosh. I wonder how THAT happens for people of one political persuasion while the opposite gets precisely the opposite, AND a passing complaint that ”Faux News” is biased, and must be banned in the interest of free speech, etc., etc., etal.

Otherwise they are silent and lacking in the kind of sanctimonious whining when real dictators and oppressive thugs are involved, even when their fellow angelic Europeans are complicit:

In fact, the main export to the EU from five of the seven countries that make up the Central African region (Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea), is oil. In particular, crude oil represents 88% of Equatorial Guinea’s exports to the EU.

And, of course, the places that THEY get their oil from has never had a spill, bad social consequence, or otherwise. Just the very fact that they’ve overturned regimes in Africa for oil, propped up dictators for it... none of this bears mentioning.

But if it doesn’t fit their ideology, and the single example that has been hammered into their heads through endless repetition, then Hurricane Katrina MUST be mentioned if the subject of the US comes up, and if the love of their Führerprinzip craving lives is threatened, they will go out of their way to construct a way to fit an oil company into a Katrina-esque meme. After all – all is Katrina, but travesties that their simple minds have to work to understand are, well, assumed by omission to be just plain okay.

Heal the Weasel Within

Everyone’s talking about the Greek credibility deficit. But enough hypocrisy

...fumes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

But when politics consists in integrating countries and whole continents by sharing the prosperity, one is bound turn a blind eye to the financial unfeasibility of these noble aspirations – aka “cohesion” in Eurospeak. “Take away the life-lie from the average society and you take its political order, too,” to put a political spin on the line from Ibsen. These life-lies include all our rhetorical efforts to whitewash the fictions of rationality underlying our society. We are supposedly living in a society under permanent observation and surveillance, constant evaluation and certification. At any rate the agencies entrusted with those tasks get paid for that. We are supposedly living in a knowledge-based society, too. So why doesn’t anyone laugh at all that bunk? Not even the most flagrant political disasters are openly acknowledged till they can no longer be denied by the laziest glutton.

And from my bulging ”so what else is new” file, the blame apparently all-powerful and nefarious outsiders is to blame for the voices in their heads:

Through complex cogitations we demonstrate that debts are investments in the future, that Europe is a great thing or that jet fuel, increased auto production, standby mode and subsidised cattle ranching can’t be the cause of climate change. It’s the Chinese and the Americans, we sigh – because the government has already sighed at them – who have finally got to get their environmental act together. And Greece has got to become credible. As credible as we are, as credible as the banks, talk show hosts, chancellors and Cretans.

A Hezbollah rally in front of the Louvre Museum: Is Europe past the point of no return?

A Hezbollah rally files down Paris's Rue de Rivoli, past the Louvre Museum (shookhran à Mark et François).

Jesse Petrilla filmed this while on a trip to Paris. Scary stuff. This is in front of the Louvre where the Mona Lisa is.

Hezbollah flags are seen throughout the rally.

1:35 A banner proclaiming support for the Iraq resistance

2:08 You can see someone holding a photo of terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah

2:50-3:30 - The ever present Arabic chant (heard at all these jihad demostrations) the genocidal Khaibar Khaibar ya yahud, jaish Muhammed sa-ya'ud--the chant reminding the Jews of Muhammad and his army's slaughter and mass beheading of the Jews of Khaibar, after they had surrendered.

2:55-2:50 - Jihadi taunting the police

6:10 - The "youths" burning an Israeli flag

6:48 - Burning another Israeli flag to shouts of Allah Akbar

Share this and post this everywhere you possibly can. Violence started later that evening, a McDonalds was destroyed and several cars torched.

Conservatives' Heroes: Are They Wretched Hypocrites with Nothing But Low, Treacherous Motives for Meeting Their Foes-To-Be Two Decades Earlier?

Remember the photo of Donald Rumsfeld meeting Saddam Hussein that was supposed to be, in and of itself, a damning condemnation of the Iraq War (which occurred 20 years (!) after a photo supposed to be indicative of the normal day-to-day diplomatic relations between two nations that were not at war at the time, not to mention photos far less prevalent than images of this type) as well as the last word on the Bush administration's — or on America's — alleged hypocrisy towards Saddam Hussein?

What if I told you a photo existed of Winston Churchill meeting with… the German Kaiser?! Would that be a reason to condemn Winston, and/or the British Empire, for going to war with Germany either in the Great War (World War I) or in World War II?

Well, the photos exist (five years prior to the Great War and — yes — exactly 20 years prior to World War II) — so we're waiting for new history books (some some sort of Howard Zinn type?) to appear (wait — one already exists), slamming that confounded hypocrite, Winston Churchill, as well as that despicable war-mongering nation, the United Kingdom…

Return of the NINJA Loan

ECB agrees to accept Greek 'junk' bonds as collateral

That kind of week ahead

It is electronica; It is German; It is a window into your soul........

Meet the Directorate

The menacingly regimented corridors, the depersonalized looking work areas that appear otherwise unoccupied, the mass of interns paid for their apparent enthusiasm... it’s the EU’s sputtering pace car on the info-bahn, its’ full time carney barker, and press operation serving an otherwise unmoved press corps.

Can’t Buy Me Love

High on their own Miaow-Miaow

2010

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso will travel to China this week (29 April - 1 May) for talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as the two sides look to map out a five-year co-operation plan.

"We will seize this opportunity to generate positive momentum in our 35-year relationship and develop a far-reaching agenda for the next five years," Mr Barroso said in a statement on Monday.

Actually they really aren’t an important global playa, but aside from that, the tone is enough to give one flashbacks.

1980:

Western analysts say the Soviet Union’s sluggish economy may be hard pressed to attain even the pared-down production goals set out for 1980.
The new year will mark the close of the current five-year plan, as Soviet officials strive to draw up the next master plan for guidance of the centrally controlled economy in 1981-1985.

Oddly enough, it’s THIS PART that has resonance today, considering the years of whining by European windbag commentators about American “cowboy capitalism”:

While Moscow commentators regularly harp on inflation, unemployment, and other woes in the West, sobering domestic figures for 1979 have made Soviet economists more cautious in assessing this country’s own performance.

And in this great passage of post-Lisbonian thinking:

Western analysts in Moscow said the Soviet economy appeared to be slowing down to such a degree that in the coming years the Kremlin spokesman may have to quietly abandon their long-time preditions about the economy eventually overtaking the west.

Instead, the analysts said, the Soviets might shift to stressing their economy’s stability and capacity for modest but sustained increments of growth

On a similar note, I hope Barrosso can account for what he meets along the way in China that cannot be criticized in the same way the United States can. Making that same “civilized, social growth” story to anyone, let alone a clutch of Chinese economists, makes them sound as silly as those Soviets saving fave.

Conrad Black summed up the self-administered delusions this way:

Europe has been harder hit than the U.S. by the economic crisis and is mired in spurious rhetoric, much of it in French, limning an illusory social-market variant to “cowboy capitalism.” This is like the Holy See’s ancient but sporadic search for a third way between socialism and capitalism. It is a vain pursuit of an economic system diluted by the imposition of self-indulgent European cultural fatigue, masquerading as gentility.

Headline Shock Horror

Euro area states could lose money on Greek loans

Film at 11......

May 1 Is Victims of Communism Day

Today is Victims of Communism Day (Spasiba to Tovarich Reynolds), what until now has been A Dishonorable Holiday…

The coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous sight of camp storm troopers in Quincy, Illinois

As Mark Steyn writes, the Canada citizen has his papers on him

— and not just because I'm in Arizona. I'm an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.

Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law?

Er, well, that would be Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But don't let the fine print of the New Deal prevent you from going into full-scale meltdown.

…All [San Francisco City Hall's] official visits to Arizona have been canceled indefinitely. You couldn't get sanctions like these imposed at the U.N. Security Council, but then, unlike Arizona, Iran is not a universally reviled pariah.

…Yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight [in Quincy, Illinois,] of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp storm troopers from either a dinner-theater space opera or uniforms night at Mr. Newsom's re-election campaign.

Kevin Greene emails Instapundit:

Can you imagine the howls this would have generated from the left had George W. Bush ever called out the SWAT team on a bunch of blue-haired retirees? But then again, George W. Bush would never have attempted this. Because George W. Bush has never been afraid of the American people.

Stop me if you have heard this one before

Some people think that a perfect political movement would consist of:

a) Nationalism
b) Socialism
c) A dash of environmental fetishism

I swear this has been tried before, but I just can't put my finger on it.

You can Tell that he’s Into it

Mobs demanding something for nothing. Adulating in your class misery. You know they love it. Some should probably be thankful for Spain’s downgraded credit rating, because it gives a whole swath of people sharing a political philosophy a reason to keep living – to complain about your misery that they caused with their budgetary demands, and “real, living Socialism”.

What people do in the privacy of theirbedrooms is none of our business

Louts Ahoy!

Our European Betters, what with their usual fine comportment and dignity... they have so much to teach us.

Ukrainian nationalists are extremely unhappy over what they see as increased Russian influence since the election of Viktor Yanukovych. They showed their displeasure today by engaging in a chaotic "debate" -- using smoke bombs and eggs -- in Ukraine's parliament over Russia's lease of a Black Sea naval base being extended until 2042.

That is, after a few years of their “wonder years” come with adult supervision.



Ah, the Mosh Pit of wise deliberation and debate, are nearly rising to the level of the level of parliamentary democracy, with its healing powers of conflict resolution, as one might find in Taiwan.

Ensemble Tout est Possible

I will miss the part where the hereditary political aristocracy was butting heads with greenies, though.

It So Happens That Every Illegal Alien in America Already Does Have Papers

Everybody has the right to papers!

thundered one outraged Democrat among legions, as they castigate Arizona's (supposedly) undemocratic law demanding that illegal aliens show documentation. (Except of course, one is tempted to ask what the big deal is when, if liberals had their way, nobody actually would need papers anywhere when they show up to cast a vote in an election…)

Well, it so happens that every illegal alien in the United States is documented; every illegal alien in the United States does have papers.

Mexican papers.

(Well, sometimes, they have Honduran papers, or Guatemalan papers, or Belizean papers, or Filipino papers, or some other papers, but let's keep using Mexico as an illustrative example…)

If a foreigner, say an American, were to head to Mexico, for however short (a vacation) or however long a period (to work there) — and whether he entered the country legally or not (!) — he still, guess what, has papers. He has his American papers! Offhand, he has his driver's license, various IDs, and/or his passport…

True, a number of the Mexican and Central American illegals, many of them paupers, may not physically have papers in their pockets to produce, as is the case with many of their respective countrymen, but still, offhand, the "undocumented" immigrants retain as many (or as few) papers, and rights, as any other citizen of their own country before they emigrated, legally or otherwise.

Everybody has the right to papers, but everybody does not have the right to American papers!

What is there to be outraged about here? The equivalent is true for Americans, and for other Westerners — for instance the Yanqui Gringo mentioned above, who does not have the right (or an automatic right) to Mexican papers. Just as I, a foreigner living in Paris, do not have right — certainly, not an automatic right — to French papers and do not have the right to vote in French elections (it is not a right I would want — no offense intended — and I would never castigate the French for failing to give it to me or to any other foreigner)…

If I had the time, we could enter a discussion regarding the difference between natural rights (which every individual on Earth has) and civic rights (or citizen rights, which depend on the country you are — legally — living in, whatever part of the globe that country is located in), but I don't, so I will just suggest you read the books of Harry Jaffa…

To return to Mexico, nothing in Mexican law presupposes that our American expatriate be given, say, a job (or that he have the freedom to choose any job he wants) in Mexico or that, say, he vote in Mexican elections. Indeed, reports on Mexico's own problem with illegal aliens (Central Americans that cross over that nation's Southern border) point out to quite a few problems in that country (the one allegedly martyred by white American racists), far worse than anything in the United States, with Amnesty International calling "the abuse of migrants in Mexico a major human rights crisis".

Indeed, as JammieWearingFool puts it (gracias por el Professor Reynolds),

No wonder they're all moving to the Nazi-like, fascistic, police-state of Arizona.

Now, if any Mexicans, say the citizens of the estado de Chihuahua, want American papers, there is a simple solution: I suggest that they ask that the state be annexed by the United States. (Don't be so quick to issue a snort. I'm sure quite a few Mexicans would be more than willing to see that happen…)

Update: Referring to el Presidente de México, Rich Galen points out the double standards:

Felipe Calderón is whining about the way we are treating immigrants in the U.S. because they may be asked to produce documents proving they are here legally, while immigrants in his very own country are being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and murdered by the tens of thousands.

Update: Don Miguel adds as follows:

How about this: my father was born and grew up in Mexico. About 10 to 15 years ago Mexico passed a law allowing children of expatriates born in other countries to apply for citizenship. I was interested in this because it would then allow me to buy beachfront property in Mexico (foreigners cannot directly buy property within a few km of the beach or border legally). So I went to the closest consulate with my father's birth certificate and they told me basically to get lost since my father was considered by them to be a "gringo." Regardless of what the law said I wasn’t the “right” type of person for them. So even though I technically met the requirements of the law, there’s no way they would process my application.

That comment leads Pat Patterson to write:

I had heard some stories like the one Don Miguel related and to be honest thought they were either old wive's tales or simple misunderstandings.

Until one of my neighbors thought it would be a good idea for his children to have dual citizenship but was turned away at the consulate in Santa Ana for 'technical reasons' even though he had only recently become an American citizen. His delay oddly enough was because he had been an officer in the Mexican Air Force and the investigation took longer because the Mexican government wouldn't release his service record for years. It seems that the rule of thumb is that college educated American citizens of Mexican origin will either not be approved or delayed while working class Americans of Mexican origin will be approved asap.

Update: Mark Steyn:

…the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight [in Quincy, Illinois,] of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp storm troopers from either a dinner-theater space opera or uniforms night at Mr. Newsom's re-election campaign.

Update: Ann Coulter:

The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler's policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?

The Pot-Banging Idiots are in Charge

Greece will never pay Germany back

Beware the rage of the Grecian street.

IFO’s Hand-Werner Sinn has warned, quite simply, that Greece is a bum. Any investor thinking of lending them a pfennig should be warned. The same is true for governments, and anyone buying the bonds of those governments that lend to them will see the rates creep up.

All fine and dandy, if you don’t think that they’ll default, but this is bad news for the taxpayers in those countries which will see the repayment cost on bond obligations rise.

The warning came as a new poll showed nearly two-thirds of Germans were opposed to helping Greece, with a majority believing that membership of the EU brought more disadvantages than advantages.

Asked on MDR radio if Berlin would ever get its money back, Sinn, who heads the Ifo institute and is one of the top economic advisers to the government, said: "To tell you the truth, no."

Greece "will not be in a position to carry out the necessary budgetary rigour" and will eventually have "to ask for Germany to waive the debt," he said.

He warned that bailing out Greece could set a precedent for other euro area countries labouring under high debt and public deficits.

Of course the feelies have to ring in as well, despite the fact that markets need to be left to establish the real, repayable, and durable value of what those loans will cost. German commentators, investors, and government are being accused to making things worse for Greece by merely thinking about what they are being asked to get into. How dare they consider the consequences to themselves.

The Greeks are mainly responsible for their current predicament. But the German government has made the country's situation worse with its lectures and reluctance to provide assistance. Chancellor Angela Merkel is mainly to blame for the fact that German taxpayers now have to suffer.

How? By her reluctance to lend an alcoholic the money to buy another bottle of Thunderbird only to have that vagrant smelling vaguely of urine show up again? It’s stupider than feeding squirrels.

Have no doubt about it, many in Europe will continue to carry on as though they’re Bolivian peasants “seeking justice” (and other people’s resources for free). Further, reason for the silence of the other EUvian über-champion economies (i.e. France, the UK, the Scandinavians, etal,) is rather obvious:

"It would be understandable if the Italians or the Spanish put pressure on us to pay up now because it is an important precedent for them," said Sinn.

Perhaps Berlin should bite this bullet, and leave the “national NINJA loans” of the likes of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland to the EU member states that are helping to be generous with German citizens’ resources now.

Agog, with Hands on Hips Akimbo

I silently hum “Don’t cry for me Argentina” when I hear this stuff:

BRUSSELS — European Union officials Wednesday were unable to mask their frustration with the downgrade of Greek debt by Standard & Poor’s to junk status.
“Who is Standard & Poor’s by the way?” asked Amadeu Altafaj

Oh piffle! Aren’t they something like People Magazine or something?

I mean, who’s this Amadeu Altafaj, anyway?

the spokesman for Olli Rehn, the E.U. monetary affairs commissioner, as he took the podium at a regular midday news briefing at the European Commission.

I guess they don’t teach that “you should actually know the subject” stuff at spokesman school. It gets better though, because it seems what they really want is that agencies DON’T rate anything in Europe, so as to put a Bund/Greek size yield gap between what their paper is really worth, versus what they wish it was worth.

Chantal Hughes, the spokeswoman for Michel Barnier, the E.U. commissioner for the internal market, then delivered a thinly veiled warning to agencies like Standard & Poor’s at the same news conference.

“We would expect that when credit rating agencies assess the Greek risk, they take due account of the fundamentals of the Greek economy and the support package prepared by the E.C.B., I.M.F. and Commission,” Ms. Hughes said. “And we of course expect that credit rating agencies, like other financial players, and in particular during this difficult and sensitive period, act in a responsible and rigorous way.”

I think they’re likely pricing in the Greek government’s ability and willingness to actually pay out on those maturities, actually, regardless of how much they can borrow from anyone else.

The E.U. passed new regulations for credit rating agencies last year after blaming them for significantly contributing to problems in the financial markets over the past two years and, in particular, for underestimating risks associated with complex financial instruments.

Which is alright, so long as you don’t price the risk on them.

Much ado about nothing....

Not sure what the AP is yammering on about:

World markets tumbled Wednesday amid acute fears that Greece's debt crisis would spread like wildfire through Europe after a leading credit ratings agency downgraded the country's debt to junk status and cut Portugal's rating as well.

After all, we know the seer of all statist seers recently reassured we the great unwashed that:

The reality is plain to see: there is no debt crisis that need cause us concern. Of course there are issues to deal with, but talk of a crisis is plain nonsense.

What is this, a moment of (somewhat) clarity from the statist touchstone:

And this then is a crisis created, in the main, by bankers – who put in place too many of the strictures inherent in the Euro; by libertarians who promote the hatred of the states and the poor regard for regulation that has denied the Greek government so much of the tax revenue it is owned and by financial institutions who (as Goldman Sachs seem to demonstrate, time and again) just love just situations to make short term profit at cost to ordinary people.

Nary a mention about the serial fraud perp'd by successive Greek governments in reporting phony economic data for years, nor the successive European governments who failed to hold the Greek governments accountable for their actions, nor the failure of EU-level governmental bodies for properly investigating the year over year over year fraud.

Then again, statists don't do governmental responsibility.

Eventually Going to Ground

A curious comment left on Gavin Hewett’s BBC news blog, went unrebutted.

In hard times Europe reasserts its true nature, antisemitic, antiroma, xenophobic, a cesspool of false national pride, ethnic hatred, and intense jealousies. All of the laws and treaties in the world can't change what is in people's hearts.

Then the author takes an interesting turn.

Outsiders may be ignored, their presence even tolerated to a degree but they are never fully integrated. Not after a generation, not after dozens of generations where they have lived peacefully yet are the objects of exclusion. America by contrast is based on a structure of shared values.

Further, without any sort of piling on to silence it, as one would normally find on this kind of forum, is a virtual Tea Party Movement sentiment coming from a Briton.

Well, people get sick and tired of being preyed upon by their government. They get sick and tired of being poor, watching their wages drop, watching their taxes rise. They get angry, they get tired. And then they start doing things all angry, tired folks generally do.

What Gavin is documenting here is the ritual of fascism. He calls it a "script" of European life. And that is correct.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

The New York Times Does It Again: Segregationist's 1960s "Hate Speech" Has "a Startlingly Contemporary Aspect"

The New York Times does it again: comparing tea partiers to the most excessive populists around the planet. This time — and again, with an insouciant and gratuitous comparison throw — Janet Maslin compares tea partiers to a Southern populist in favor of segregation. The tea partiers comparison, t'is true, is not quite spelled out, but it's quite clear whom she has (or whom her editors have) in mind. In a book review of Hampton Sides' Hellhound on His Trail, she writes that Eric Starvo Galt (aka James Earl Ray), the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr, "worked as a volunteer for the presidential campaign of George Wallace", which is fair enough, but then she adds a description of Wallace,

whose incendiary speeches and claims that a “whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do” are enough to give the hate speech in “Hellhound on His Trail” a startlingly contemporary aspect.

Enabling Evil

Merkel is aware of Germany’s aiding proliferation, but little is being done about it. How could it, in a world where the leader of Europe’s security benefactor still thinks that protecting oneself with a missile shield is a “provocation”?

‘According to the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran, two thirds of Iranian industrial enterprises and three quarters of its small and medium-sized firms use machines and systems of German origin. As Berlin’s Federal Agency for Foreign Trade affirmed in 2007, Germany is still Iran’s No. 1 supplier of almost all types of machinery apart from power systems and construction, where Italian manufacturers dominate the market.‘

The incredibly feeble part of it, is that it’s being used as an argument against free trade, using the tone of protectionist astroturfing of the issue from a “anti-globalization” position to get it through the reader’s thick heads:

When is such free trade, stupidity and suicidal? Should Europe be supplying Iran with instruments for the death of the West? Who in Brussels is listening while the regime and the crowds shout ‘Death to the Great Satan’ or ‘the world devourers’ — USA, Britain and Europe? They have been shouting that for THIRTY years.

And in that time, the Europeans, who are in the range of Iran’s missiles, used the opportunity to taunt the United States with accusations of fear-mongering for trying to do something about it, and in fact, using their flaccid and empty chattering, as if the Iranians were living by the rules of Victorian era gentlemen, as diplomatic cover under which Iran has managed to buy enough time to build (and buy from supposed “allies”) what they have.

The reaction, to all of this, is as one would expect. To demonize anyone mentioning the threat, and to advocate disarming their own states to put the strategic balance in the Iranians’ favor, and busying themselves with self-indulgent, stylized irrelevancies.

Step 3:

Seek the reason behind all of this ridiculous acting and then mush it together with all other hippie activists that have come before. Most hippies don't have new reasons for their social position or existence. Many just cling to a little dab here and there of purpose and protest but more or less are quiet, introspective, mumbling idealists. They may have great ideas in mind but have trouble expressing them. Many simply recycle old ideas and theories and regurgitate them in current tongue. World peace, anti-war, anti-establishment, free love, or simply liking the pretty colors will suffice for this step.

It’s probably a good way to pass the time waiting to watch missiles track overhead as well.

New York Times Compares Tea Parties to France's Ultra-Right-Wing and Racist National Front

In Michael Kimmelman's article about the status of the French language and about French culture and identity, the New York Times insouciantly (and gratuitously) throws in a comparison of America's tea parties to France's far-right party, the National Front, a faction whose members are routinely described as populist, reactionary, racist, and, above all, (very) dangerous. (That seems to be becoming the narrative, in France and elsewhere, as American expatriate Jake Lamar did something similar in Le Monde Magazine last weekend, "explaining" to French readers that Fox News would be like a popular French news channel, albeit run by le Front National.)

This ["having a common language doesn’t assure you a common political or cultural point of view"] may sound perfectly obvious to Americans, but it’s not necessarily so to France’s growing tea party contingent. The populist National Front party won some 20 percent of the vote in the south last month (less nationwide), despite Mr. Sarkozy’s monthslong campaign to seduce right-wing voters by stressing the preservation of French national identity. Part of that campaign has been affirming a policy of cultural exceptionalism.

The Front National is not only wrongly called the equivalent of a "tea party contingent" (for some reason, in case it might interest you, the International Herald Tribune's print version puts the expression "tea party" in quotes, thus: 'France’s growing "tea party" contingent'), the Michael Kimmelman article also wrongly seems to suggest, deliberately or otherwise, that the FN is a recent phenomenon (based you would think in effect on America's tea party), when Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the party almost 40 years ago…

Update: The New York Times does it again…

French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French

French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French

écrit Michael Kimmelman (see whom the New York Times compares tea partiers to).

More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France, bringing their native cultures with them.

Which raises the question: So what does French culture signify these days when there are some 200 million French speakers in the world but only 65 million are actually French? Culture in general — and not just French culture — has become increasingly unfixed, unstable, fragmentary and elective. Globalization has hastened the desire of more people, both groups and individuals, to differentiate themselves from one another to claim a distinct place in the world, and language has long been an obvious means to do so.

You’re Hopeless if...

...all you can imagine freedom amounts to, is the unfettered theft of intellectual property. I’m sure the authors and musicians don’t think it’s a bargain.

Pirate parties fighting for increased freedom in sharing online content have formed an international organisation, writes Público. Gathered in Brussels, delegates from 44 countries approved statutes affirming the movement’s apolitical stance and non-profit motive. “The online content industry is leading a worldwide effort to limit civil liberties. This is the first step in our counterattack”,

And to think the German “Pirate Party” imagines themselves to be the continent’s smart and edgy, “I wear weird glasses” Libertarian types. The best they could come up with is basically to unionize, and stick it to the people who are actually creative. It flies in the face of their stand on the propriety of private communication, something they do believe to be somehow a different kind of private property than some author’s book or song. Tapping them is fair game.

Do they even know what rights are?

Oh No! They Killed Fatima!

Will someone find me some of those mobs of moderates who have something to say about this style of “raising awareness”?

A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of "South Park" that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.

The most utter humorless, thin skinned culture on earth, just got less worthy of anyone’s concern.

Reaching by phone early Tuesday, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post, said he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of van Gogh was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone did by mocking Muhammad.

"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."

Using the naming style of al-Queda’s mud-hut-in-the-middle-of-dirt notion of internationalism, the man renamed himself “al Imriki” or “the American,” just like Azzam al Amriki (the buffoonish threat-monger, Adam Gadahn), Abu Ayyub al-Masri (Masri = Egyptian), etc., etc., and the rest of the muppet rejects.

The guy is a playtime wannabe Jihadist, who even by the dim standards of Arab society finds “enriching” the reducing of your persona to your nation of origin within “the global caliphate”.

Al Amrikee said the website is considering a protest against the "disgusting" show, which also depicted the Prophet Muhammad in an episode on July 4, 2001.

"This is not a small thing," he said. "We should do whatever we can to make sure it does not happen again."

And to think it only took him 8 years and 10 months to catch on.

Tell you what, Spanky: you stop apologizing, if not abetting the murder and abuse of Arab Christians simply because of their consciences, and I’ll start worrying about you tender little feelings, and ignore your desperate outbursts trying to prop up your distorted notion of what manhood is. To him, it seem that a man is someone who murders when offended, then tells himself something to call his extremism socially “just”.

Carville's "Reptiles" Smear Is a Perfect Illustration of Lincoln Describing the 19th-Century Demonization of Republicans

Plus ça change… James Taranto points out (thanks to Instapundit) that

former Clinton aide James Carville, raising money for the Democratic National Campaign Committee, put his name to an email titled "reptiles," which insults Republicans in a way some see as invidious:

First there was Sarah Palin. Now we can add another Republican reptile from the past trying to help the GOP win House races this year--former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

How could anybody better illustrate my contention (a mere observation, really) — discernible in my upcoming graphic novel with Dan Greenberg, The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln — that not much has changed from a century and a half ago, specifically when Honest Abe spoke at the Cooper Union in February 1860 (150 years ago), addressing the Republicans' castigators:

…when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to [Republicans]. In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of [Republicanism] as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

Update: Lincoln Reloaded: The House Divided Speech, Updated for 2010

A Swiss TV Report on Sarkozy Unseen in France

(Merci à Sandy)

Stop All Human Activity Now!

What are, nettlesome wannabe do-gooders, if not the sort of people willing to be generous with other people’s resources? I ask myself that daily, quite frankly, knowing full well that it isn’t going to make EUvian do the only thing they know how: leveraging others’ ability to do what they’re incapable of.

Extra climate meetings agreed as treaty remains elusive

While it is likely at this stage, that the word “summit” has been banalized from overuse.

The lack of a specific roadmap means that the June talks in Bonn will have to continue to debate operational issues rather than moving on to debating the substance of any future treaty.

Thankfully, we have the developing world to spank some common sense into them:

Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC executive secretary, told BBC News that the chances of seeing a new treaty this year are "very slim".

"I think that developing countries will want to see what the nature of an agreement is going to be before they will be willing to turn it into a legally-binding treaty, so that basically means a two-step process," he said.

As opposed to the preferred “one step” process, whereby the nations of the world agree to a legally binding mechanism concocted by a small committee (considering the global terms on which they would like to operate,) without knowing what the consequences are.

We R Smartr Than Kluless Amurcans, and We Kan Spel

Euranet, the sneery, EU funded radio operation, had heading their page a spelling error worthy of an unpaid blogger or University intern working for peanuts. With a sharp, critical eye on Romanian relationship with the United States, formed out of a complete absence of European support for Romanian security concerns, they are being critical of the Romanian military’s purchase of 24 refurbished F-16s. It could only “come as a surprise” to them if the EU-3 operate on the assumption that all other members of the union were “junior members” in nature, and can’t act without their approval on national matters.

Never mind the fact that German and French tried to condition financial aid to Greece on the sale of ships and fighters, or what that does to the Union for all’s relationship with Turkey. They European governments ARE the embodiment of that secretive and weird mystery-illuminati that so many of their citizens seem to think are lurking under every Menorah and behind every American flag.

As to the rest of the story, the likes of Euranet seem unwilling to touch the inconvenient background to the story from late March.

Swedish defense manufacturer Saab on March 26 asked the Romanian government to explain why it has decided to purchase second-hand U.S. F-16 fighter planes to the detriment of the Saab-manufactured Gripen fighter. The issue was also brought up in a meeting between Romanian Senate Chairman Mircea Geoana — the leading opposition figure in Romania — and EU member state ambassadors in Bucharest on March 25, with Geoana stating that he will bring the issue up for vote in the legislature if the government does not respond to the criticism. With the announced purchase of second-hand U.S. F-16s Romania is essentially signaling that its commitment to the U.S. security alliance takes precedent over its economic alliance with Europe.

Along with Swedish Saab, Romania also spurned the French-made Rafale and the British-Italian-French-Spanish Eurofighter. Bucharest’s decision also means that Saab will have to depend on the upcoming Brazilian decision on whether to purchase Gripen NG’s, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets or Rafales. Indications at the moment are that Brazil will choose Rafales in what is considered a “political” decision by the Brazilian government to increase its military cooperation with France.

Ergo: “cooperation” = sales from governments that wouldn't lift their finger if the Russians, always searching for Ivan Ivanovich's imaginary collective manhood, start to meddle in the Black Sea. Bien compris?

Prognosticus Revisited

Needless to say, we are all shocked and dismayed upon reading the latest:

Greek debt crisis gets worse as EU revises figures

Afterall, it was just a few scant weeks ago that our favourite statist touchstone was pronouncing, from on high, a verdict regarding the very same subject:

The reality is plain to see: there is no debt crisis that need cause us concern. Of course there are issues to deal with, but talk of a crisis is plain nonsense.

What, me worry?

das Mantras

Something is missing here:

Nevertheless, says Brannigan, "Germans can be proud of this law." Without the help of lawmakers, he says, Germany would hardly have seen such dynamic development of renewable energy sources. What was once a niche industry has turned into a sector with global importance. The solar industry is responsible for almost 80,000 jobs in Germany alone.

But lawmakers have overshot the mark by far, at least when it comes to subsidies for solar energy. Anyone who installs solar panels benefits from guaranteed feed-in tariffs for the next 20 years. That means that, over a 20-year period, Germany's electricity customers will pay a total of around €14 billion in subsidies -- just for the solar panels that were installed in 2009. And that cost is likely to rise in the future, because Germans are mounting more and more solar collectors on their roofs. Economists estimate that all the solar panels installed by 2013 will cost German consumers more than €70 billion. Thanks to the generous subsidy program, crops on some fields have been replaced with arrays of shimmering, bluish modules mounted on automated stands and tilted toward the sun. And all of this is being done for an amount of electricity that meets only 1.1 percent of German demand.

Ahh yes, the phraseology is no longer renewable and sustainable energy sources. The narrative moves on....

The Minister of Everything: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Rotten Spring

John Vinocur on Nicolas Sarkozy:

The polls are awful these days, while commentaries range largely from the impatient and disappointed to the cruel and vicious. Mr. Sarkozy’s seemingly raucous, self-absorbed personal style is a constant target, while his campaign promises to vitalize and reform French politics and economic performance are increasingly mocked as substanceless.

[Both Jacques Chirac and] his predecessor, François Mitterrand, had worse poll results than Mr. Sarkozy, and even more obvious political setbacks, each losing his parliamentary majority in mid-mandate elections.

…But both men, who ruled into their 70s, projected a kind of presidential serenity that Mr. Sarkozy, 20 years younger, has not. They kept a fairly regal distance from daily domestic policy making and politics — in contrast to their successor’s hands-on-everything approach.

…A Gaullist colleague of the president … said, “Sarkozy literally personalized every aspect of government and became the minister of everything. He thought he could move from agriculture to labor to immigration fast enough to stay a moving target. As it turned out, he became the target of every constituency imaginable.”

Roger Cohen joins in with Reading Sarkozy’s Mind:

And Iran. Ooh la la! All these advisers telling me Khamenei is not Ahmadinejad and Ahmadinejad is not Larijani. C’est du baloney! Du pur baloney! They’re all the same band of liars playing with us like a cat with a ball of wool.

Oh, Those Dastardly Francophobic Americans

I have yet to see any mention in the US general interest press, or even the financial press of the nationality of the Goldman Sachs VP who played a supporting role to John Paulson, the man behind the failed financial product that the SEC’s nicely timed investigation is all about.

Otherwise, you find the usual anonymous net nitwit comments that reveal a soul of a nation, the one that likes to find associations between nationalities and inherent wrongness in the same way bombasts used to use race:

Je suis très étonnée qu'il n'y ai que des français qui aient très mauvaise réputation. Tous les traders sont à mettre dans le même panier. on devrait supprimer la BOURSE on serait tranquille.

or:

“I am very surprised that there have only the French who have very bad reputation. All traders are put in one basket. we should eliminate STOCK to keep things calm”

As usual, there are no other people out there in the world, and that fact that people are more relevant for who they are instead of what they do figures into a good reason to bloviate stupidly about market economics that the commenter doesn’t understand anyway.

It’s like the old off-hand statement one used to hear “those smart, humane people” say about how there shouldn’t be any money, and then everyone will be free of worry and prosperous.

In either case, I’m always trying to figure out who’s taking the other side of that trade.

Hide the Ash

There’s no social prohibition on calling THIS ‘climate model’ flawed. No-one will berate you for hours on end. Then again, unlike the earthquake in Haiti, no-one is leaping to blame the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on manmade global warming.

The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses.

Nature’s power, yadda-yadda, indeed, not to mention the fine example it makes of man’s powerlessness to effect it. Just don’t say anything about man not being responsible for the entire earth’s weather.

“It is a black box in certain areas,” Matthias Ruete, the EU’s director-general for mobility and transport, said on Monday, noting that many of the assumptions in the computer models were not backed by scientific evidence.

Shhh!

Unity, at a Glance

It always boils down to “the better angels of your spirit be damned”. EU membership, is, if nothing else, a means by which to use stereotypes and history shake one another down. Like the UN, poor people in rich countries are being expected to indulge the desires of rich people in poor counties, and this is what it sounds like:

Greeks should boycott German goods

Berlin has been hesitant on the issue of a financial package for Greece and Chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested it should be possible to exclude offending countries from the Eurozone. The Greeks should not take such a show of contempt sitting down, writes the left-liberal daily Ta Nea: "The German attitude has nothing in common with how Kohl, Mitterrand and Delors saw the EU, namely as a melting pot that would bring about European unity. The time has come for us to react. Berlin has reaped much advantage from the EU, and now it is refusing to provide resources to help it out in a time of need.

Like all good little retrograde leftists, the class warfare card gets pulled out, even if does operate on the assumption that Germans are rich because they’re German, not because of what they do. It’s the SOS of European history.

They should import fewer German products and buy more Italian, French, Spanish and Greek goods. Only in this way will Merkel grasp that a racist attitude to other countries can be economically detrimental, particularly to Germany."

I guess that makes them “Anglo Saxon” straw-men after the fashion of the French nationalists looking at any population that goes its’ own way without taking the vague desires of their population as a guide to how they should conduct their lives.

My approach to that issue is to immediately make the point that if the rest of us are Anglo-Saxons, something that the Francophilic users of the term mysteriously avoid applying to Germans, is to say that it would otherwise be just to call the users of the term Visigoths, fans of brutal, central authority, and tribal goading and mayhem, which is actually more applicable to the melting-pot societies they try to apply the disparagement to.

The array of one caste against another, a practice which has never failed to destroy a government and degrade a people, is conspicuous everywhere. The court was regarded rather as a place of execution than the seat of the rendition of justice; the judge rather an avenger of injury, than the representative of the law and the guardian of social order.

Theirin we find the roots of modern day, European feel-good solidarity, no different than the anti-Anglo-Saxons of today:

The execrable errors of heretics in general, having been already prohibited and disposed of, it now becomes our duty to make special provision for some that exist in our days, and of which we are, at present, well aware. For while the virtue of God, by the sword of his Word, extirpated all other heresies, root and branch, we have to lament that the soil of our kingdom is still only defiled by the infamy of the Jews.

If that isn’t an accurate reflection of present day populism, I don’t know what is, and to think that it came after 1360 years of self-administered diversity training.

It's not about rich versus poor: It's about parasites versus producers; It's about takers versus makers

This will give you an idea of some of the outrage that’s fueling the tea party movement. When I asked a local tea party organizer what got her started, one of the first things she mentioned was the contrast between what ordinary people were doing with their own budgets—cutting back, giving up on luxuries, trying to dig themselves out of debt—and what the federal government was doing: a spending binge financed by vast new quantities of debt that we will have to pay. People are outraged, and they are terrified of a future in which America’s only growth industry is government.

Thus writes Robert Tracinski.

The New York Times just put out an analysis of a survey on the tea party movement. I love it when the mainstream media does surveys like this, because the results are usually a mix of the totally obvious and the totally wrong.

For example, they found out that "while most Republicans say they are 'dissatisfied' with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as 'angry.'" I hope they didn't pay too much money to find that out.

Now for the totally wrong part. When I got an e-mail alert about this article, the headline read, "Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class." Issues of class? What does that mean? The article says that we're motivated by "the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich." Yeah, we're concerned that the government hasn't done enough to help out the rich, that's why we're marching. Not enough bailouts for Goldman Sachs.

These guys are incorrigible old Marxists, so they want to see everything as class warfare between the workers and the capitalists. So they miss the real class division that is driving the tea party movement: a division between the producer class versus the parasite class. It's a division between people who take on the responsibility of supporting themselves and who end up having to pay all of the bills for runaway government, too, versus the people who want to live off of our work. That includes the poor people who are, for example, getting checks from the government for "tax credits" on income taxes that they never paid. This is the new form of welfare, by the way, because it's a way that politicians can give handouts while calling it a "tax cut." So you give people a tax credit that they can claim as going toward an income tax "refund," even though they don't make enough money to pay income taxes in the first place. It's a handout disguised as a tax refund. But we're also angry about the guys making $150,000 a year as bureaucratic paper-shufflers in Washington, and the guys with politically connected businesses who are getting money from bailouts and the stimulus and the "green jobs" racket.

It's not about rich versus poor. It's about parasites versus producers. It's about takers versus makers.

The Obama Doctrine: Ignore the great threats and cloak the lesser threats in faux unity, pomp, and circumstance

Assemble all these pieces and an Obama Doctrine begins to take shape

concludes Cliff May.

Assemble all these pieces and an Obama Doctrine begins to take shape. It might be summed up this way: Ignore the great threats and cloak the lesser threats in faux unity, pomp and circumstance; talk incessantly and carry a shrinking stick. Somehow, I doubt that's the change most Americans have been hoping for.

Compare with Frank Gaffney's definition of the Obama Doctrine…

Go West: “I am the liberals’ worst nightmare!”

Colonel Allen West (thanks to Valerie):

I've been called an oreo; I've been called a token; I've been called a sell-out; I've been called an Uncle Tom; and to all of those people that call me names, I want to tell you them something: all that does for an old paratrooper, just makes him dig in his heels even more!

I am standing here with my American brothers and sisters! And it has nothing to do with race! It has nothing to do with color! It's all about your character! And we don't have character in Washington, D.C.!

…I am the liberals’ worst nightmare! They cannot afford to have a young man from the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to rise up in this country, because I completely invalidate all of their social welfare policies that have been tearing up our country.

Mindless Class Warfare at it’s Oldest

So goes the headline:

“Rich getting richer, study finds”

Good, because I don’t think the poor are hiring anyone.

This repeating of this pedantic argument was overdue, anyway. It involved the RELATIVE differences in earnings. In other words, if you eliminate wealth in this statistical model, the rate of poverty falls. Not REAL poverty, just the poverty identified as that called out RELATIVE to the richest earner.

In fact, the fascinating thing about this notion is that if the rich REALLY DO get richer, and the middle income earners are impoverished, it still shows a drop in RELATIVE poverty – which they are using to calculate the rate of poverty.

That’s to be made distinct from ACTUAL poverty. Absolute social success in the “income gap” model means that everyone is poor, especially since they no longer have anyone to work for, short of a central government who will have to RAISE THE TAXES ON THE POOR to fund the milk of human kindness, which, at that point, usually requires that you know someone to have access to.

What does growing income inequality mean for society? Koedijk said he feared it could undermine social cohesion. Those on top, particularly in finance, can do as they please for the rest of their life after landing a top position. This leaves them free from entering into any long-term commitments.

Which is known to Americans as “owning your fate” and freedom from government dependency. It doesn’t require a great deal of wealth to achieve, just common sense, a ken for saving and investing, and a liberated mind. In fact it’s very “middle class” once you walk off of the plantation of the left.

Paging Michael Moore, Janeane Garofalo, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and anyone at the New York Times Editorial Board

Ahem:

On a cool but sun-drenched Sunday, the president and three golfing companions went to Andrews Air Force Base to play 18 holes. It is the 32nd time Mr. Obama has played golf since taking office Jan. 20, 2009, according to CBS Radio's Mark Knoller.

Fair enough.

However:

Mr. Obama has played golf far more often than former President George W. Bush. In his eight years in office, Mr. Bush played just 24 times. His last time as president was Oct. 13, 2003.

He said in 2008 that he gave up golf "in solidarity" with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," Mr. Bush said in a White House interview Saturday with the Politico. "I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

He stopped playing after he received word of a deadly attack in Iraq while playing golf during a stay at the family ranch near Crawford, Texas.

"They pulled me off the golf course, and I said it's just not worth it anymore to do," Mr. Bush said in the interview.

Since Mr. Obama took office, 397 soldiers have died in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Another 151 have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Filed under, consistency alert

The most pressing issues of war and peace ....

....can wait. Our best and brightest are otherwise engaged with the truly weighty issues of the day:

AN overseas holiday used to be thought of as a reward for a year’s hard work. Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer.

Under the scheme, British pensioners could be given cut-price trips to Spain, while Greek teenagers could be taken around disused mills in Manchester to experience the cultural diversity of Europe.

The idea for the subsidised tours is the brainchild of Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, who was appointed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

The scheme, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year, is intended to promote a sense of pride in European culture, bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.

Do note, that would cost hundreds of millions of tax-payer funded pounds a year.

(h/t to the Godfather)

"Vigilance" Now Has a Place in the Major League of Fuzziness Alongside "Inacceptable"

The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to cost the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep

writes John Vinocur.

Is this a descending spiral of resolve fated to result in sanctions that pinch, nip or tweak? …the United States could seem to some of its allies to be shying away from pressing the United Nations to adopt extensive sanctions on the export of refined petroleum products to Iran.

…Besides, if we’re dealing in morality on serious methods for depriving Iran of nuclear weapons capability or a bomb, lowering the level of gasoline exports to Iran instead of carrying out airstrikes on presumed nuclear installations would seem to be a far preferable “humanitarian” approach (Mr. Rhodes’ word) for both Iranians and the U.S. military.

The French, who are pretty consistently tough on Iran, appeared truly irritated a few months back when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in moving away from her call for crippling sanctions, expressed a preference for sanctions that would “not contribute to the suffering of ordinary Iranians.”

…Ah, vigilance. It’s also the word, open to a hundred interpretations, that has come under discussion as a substitute for U.N. sanctions banning transactions involving Iran’s central bank.

With all its vagueness, vigilance now has a place in the major league of fuzziness alongside “unacceptable,” the term used by the United States and its friends concerning Iran’s eventually achieving nuclear weapons status. No course in diplomatic exegesis is required to think that’s an awful long way from saying, “We won’t allow it.”

You’ll Eat it and You’ll Like it!

The EU’s Lisbon Treaty (Not to be confused with the Lisbon Strategy), it seems, has a Trojan Horse inside it. Laws, if passed by elected MEPs, can be simply re-written in closed committee as a part of the process of outlining the means of exercising those laws.

The system works like this: after an EU law has been agreed by the European Parliament and Council (after having been proposed by the Commission), the Commission, aided by national experts, still has room for manoeuvre in amending or adding to the Directive at a later date, with limited involvement from the European Parliament and the Council. Whenever a Directive says that something will be decided through "implementing measures",

Called “comitology,” it sounds very much like a term imported from France, one bound up with the far-left fantasies of a social state of lockstep action by the population.

The European Affairs Committee of the Danish Parliament has noted that the system of comitology “means that the Commission can adopt EU legislation against the will of a majority of Member States in the Council", saying “We find such a procedure undemocratic” and “Another problem with the comitology system is the short time made available for parliamentary scrutiny.”

And here’s the really sad part:

The word comitology is going to disappear! The only common element of understanding about it is going to be removed from the dictionary. From now on, people will talk of delegated acts (which replace quasi-legislative acts) and implementing acts (which replace comitology strictu sensu).

And it will simply be “assumed” to be part of the process that doesn’t need to be identified or mentioned. “Thank goodness!” Insiders must be thinking... “Democracy averted!” As for magnitude?

He concludes, "comitology represents about 98 percent of the regulatory activity of the Union in a year. And this 98 percent is the Commission's competence".

The author further notes that otherwise, the implementation of European construction would come to a standstill. Not quite. It’s those measures pushed through the Comity process that would come to a standstill, as only 2% of them seem to have the simplicity to become law on their own, or enough public support to not need revision.

What’s worse, is that the act of arguing and proposing those laws, absent the language of executable law, details, and enough information to determine the consequences from jump street, simply encourages irresponsibility and the unmooring of the caring sounding declarations from reality, as though it would be nice if every subject and serf should have their own unicorn ranch, and that it’s a human right, knowing that a committee is there it work out how to redefine a Unicorn and a Farm to be, say, a envelope with a stamp affixed to it.

It’s a moral hazard like no other.

And Now for Something Completely Scandinavian

Regarding the Iceland's volcano eruption:

Unable to fly out of Oslo after an appearance on the popular Scandinavian talk show Skavlan on Thursday, John Cleese explained to Norway’s TV2 in a telephone interview that he has hailed a taxi and embarked on a 930-mile ride from Oslo to Brussels.

The Poles' "Obsession" with Katyn

Little seems to have changed in French attitudes regarding communist crimes since Wajda's Katyn came out a year ago and was immediately lambasted by Le Monde for having the audacity to compare Soviet crimes with those of the Nazis…

In Le Monde, again, we have one article lamenting the Poles' obsession with Katyn (simple question: why is the Poles' anger over 21,000 murders over a few weeks — a liquidation that was denied for decades — an "obsession" while that of leftists the world over — i.e., the self-same leftists who took the Kremlin's decade-long denials for granted — regarding Pinochet's 3,000 victims over 17 years nothing but respect for life and truth and the pursuit of justice?), while another, by Franck Nouchi, speaks of the mass massacre without once mentioning Soviet guilt.

That "Sovietolatrous" article describes the the DVD of the Wajda film which has just come out in France, noting that the French version features, among other bonuses, two 1943 propaganda films, one of German (Nazi) newsreels from the area (rightly) accusing the Soviets of the massacre, along with later Soviet newsreels counter-accusing the Germans thereof. Franck Nouchi's conclusion (mentioning the alleged Soviet "academicians" and "scientists" — without quotation marks — who came to "study" the forest, allegedly objectively, in order to pinpoint guilt): Only the trees of Katyn know what really happened…

As one Le Monde reader concludes, regarding "ce sinistre billet soviétolâtre":

Nouchi et « Le Monde » se remettront-ils un jour de la chute de l'URSS ?

Will Nouchi and Le Monde ever get over the collapse of the USSR?

What’s Old is Old Again

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The number of antisemitic incidents mushroomed in many western EU countries in 2009 due to an organised anti-Gaza war campaign, a new study says.

Alas, further furry fables from EUtopia, land of love, tolerance and world peace:

Looking at the number of violent incidents in absolute terms, the UK and France lead the EU league table, followed by Germany, Belgium and Austria. Relatively high numbers are also seen in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden.

You’ll note that what triggers the attackers is not what any of the victims does, but what their identities are believed to represent to the attackers. In other words: the same old small-minded continental rubbish that they know “classically European” people can no longer do to one another in the same way they permit themselves to say and do to others, even to whole classes of people that they have always made straw-men of, and imaginary sources of their struggles of.

It’s only a matter of time until someone prominent starts to blame Greece’s economic problems on some generic concept they have of Jews. It will surely go unquestioned by Europeans who have likely never met a Jew too.

The institute said the rise was due to an organised campaign by far-left parties and Muslim communities, funded by "oil money" rather than due to a spontaneous reaction, although the report does not provide evidence for this accusation.

"The intensity and nature of the wave that began in January 2009 testified to pre-planned mobilisation among radicals from the left and among Muslim immigrant communities," it said.

The “oil money” part sounds a little sketchy, but isn’t that far fetched when you consider some of the opinions overheard made by near-Eastern business people. In fact one of the ttraits one finds with the younger ones, is a desire to be liked by the aboriginal Europeans, which frequently amounts to young, politically active and fairly extreme college students who coddle the old racial arguments out of mere ignorance of the past, being morally bereft when it comes to anyone other than their friends and families, and a youthful lack of life experience.

To single THEM out and characterize them, they are frequently seen wearing contrived looking whispy scarves, sweaters, no jackets (except for fake “army surplus” style jackets in the dead of winter,) and go strategically unkempt. Absent any air of dignity it’s just another uniform pulled out of history like so many others in their self-immolating continent’s past.

Remember, they’re better than you and I are. More smarter too!

Le Monde in Awe of Obama Bowing to China's Dictator

The Apologizer-in-Chief's bow to China's dictator Hu Jintao makes the front page of Le Monde…

Bookmarks switched at birth

Wait, did I click on the Onion or Spiegel......